The Democrats’ Fuzzy Math

The Democrats’ answer to every question is, soak the rich. The problem is that there aren’t enough rich people and, sadly, they aren’t rich enough, either. The Democrats’ current campaign to extend the payroll tax holiday and pay for it with a 3.25 percent surtax on modified adjusted gross income in excess of $1 million is a case in point. Do those numbers actually add up? Of course not, but the complicit media don’t bother to point that out. A reader does the math:

The taxes on the highest incomes are never enough for any of their schemes. The Dems’ proposal is a fraud, which the MSM helps to perpetrate by never estimating the revenues from upper income tax increases.

Politico reports that the cost of the Democrats’ payroll tax reduction is $265 billion. Will that really be paid for by a 3.25 percent surtax on adjusted gross incomes over $1 million?

According to the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute/Brookings Institute, approximately 388,000 households have income above $1 million in any given year; the average income of such households is about $2.7 million. The surtax would be levied on the increment above $1 million. So the arithmetic is simple on a static analysis: 388,000 * $1.7 million * 3.25% = $21.437 billion.

So the “millionaires and billionaires” surtax doesn’t come even remotely close to the reduction in payroll tax. It’s a complete fraud–gratuitous class warfare for revenues that, in the overall scheme of things, are trivial.

No one ever accused the Democrats of being mathematical wizards, but there is something pathetic about their current attacks on the “rich”–the very people they count on to pay for all of their schemes. It is ironic, to say the least, that from the Democrats’ perspective the nation suffers, more than anything else, from a shortage of rich people.